I have a group of SNMP enabled devices on a remote network, separated from me by a NAT firewall that I need SNMP access to. I am on the outside of the firewall so I have no route to the devices, unless I NATed them out, which I won't do for security reasons. I do have a management server on the inside that is locked down and NATed to the outside that I can SSH into and run my snmp queries. What I am attempting to do is automate this process with a client-server type script. I need to pass the server an IP and a command (what to get) and wait for the server to respond. I have that basic piece of code written as follows: server

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new('LocalPort' => 7890,
                                   'Proto' => 'tcp',
                                   'Listen' => SOMAXCONN)
                            or die "Can't create socket ($!)\n";

        print "[Server Started]\n";

while (my $client = $socket->accept) {

        if ($client->peeraddr) { print "[Connect from " . gethostbyadd
+r($client->peeraddr, AF_INET) . "]\n"; }

        my $reply = "test";

        my $act = <$client>;

        print $act;

        print $client "$reply\n";

        close $client or die "Can't close ($!)\n";
}



die "Can't accept socket ($!)\n";
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client

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my $host = shift || die "No host";
my $port = 7890;
my $action = shift || die "No action";
my $ip = shift || die "No ip";


my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET(
                   PeerAddr => $host,
                   PeerPort => $port,
                   Proto    => 'tcp')
                 or die "Can't Bind :$@!\n\n";

        print $sock "$action ";
        print $sock "$ip\n";


while( <$sock> ) {
         print $_;
         }


close $sock;
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I haven't written the meat of the code to perform the SNMP actions, but they will just be subs in a module used in the server program. This works okay for passing pings and pongs back and forth, but I am looking to pass more data. Is there a way I can pass an array or a hash across the socket without formatting it to ASCII first then having to reassemble on the other end? If not, I might just use the SSH module instead and save having to code a server.